Um... Why would it be "awesome" for the Empire to win the war? I've got Imps and Pubs, but the Empire is pretty vile. They're big on things like enslaving the population of entire planets or setting up Nazi-style death camps for nonhumans. I think the ability to have stories within such an Empire is quite fascinating (particularly if you're light-side. Trying to be a decent person who works for Imperial Intelligence is certainly interesting.....), but why would anyone actually want them to win? I mean, they're almost over-the-top with their evil. It's like hoping that Mordor wins, or wishing that the Nazis had won. Am I missing something here?

Sociologists should preserve this thread as a wonderful example of the overpowering feeling of entitlement held by many young gamers today. Future scholars will be fascinated. The levels of narcissism and self-serving non-logic is really quite impressive.

Since when is a mez only useful for Wpvp? I miss Holiday. She was the only thing I liked about Tharan...

*shrug* So says you. Personally, I like 'em being on the market. I just think that the price in comms was way too high; grinding should be a more feasible way to get 'em. (which I'd guess is the "miscommunication". Those comm prices are way out of whack for what you get for 'em and the time it takes to earn 'em) Then again, as I've written already, I also have no problem with them letting us use cartel coins to avoid all sorts of grinding. Some people find the end-game gear grind fun. More do not. A way for those of us who don't care about whether we have the absolute top-tier to quickly gear a toon (particularly an alt, for people who were willing to gear one toon but who don't have the time to do it with a second, even if they wouldn't mind having a geared 50 with a different role or class) enough to at least have a chance at seeing the story-level content in the game we subscribed to wouldn't be the end of the world. Those who want to do the full grind to do all the nightmare modes can still do so and boast of it. Some of y'all are going to object that the grind is the whole point of MMO's. Well, I disagree. I play SWTOR to see the story content while playing with friends, not because I like doing daily missions over and over again so that I can get the gear that will allow met to do story mode ops over and over again in order to get the gear that allows me to do the T1 HM ops over and over again so that I can do the T2 SM ops over and over again...... etc. Don't get me wrong. The endless grind with friends might have been partly fun when I was a lot younger and less busy. But I just don't have time for it. I totally fail to see, therefore, how me paying extra money so that I can have the opportunity to see all the content in the game I've already paid for and subscribed to for a year in any way is unfair to anyone else. Is it "unfair" that other people have more time to play the game than I do? Does that mean that Bioware should figure out how much playtime the average player can dedicate to the game each week and use that as an weekly cap in playtime? Younger folks (those with summer vacations, relatively free undergrad schedules, or no job or kids, etc.) often have an advantage in time. Us busy folks with jobs and kids often have an advantage in money. As long as the money solution can't buy better equipment than you can get through crafting, drops, GTN, etc., then I don't see how P2W is even part of the equation. P2W means that you must pay to win. If you put full Rakata sets (or even Campaign or Dread Guard) on the cartel network that's not P2W. Lots of folks on the server will have already earned all that stuff for free through grinding. Anyway....

Yhea, totally agree. While the new upgrades make the old missions now super-easy, the new missions are all stupid-hard even with all the upgrades. I've completed a couple of them, but overall assaulting a large fleet and space station solo isn't really all that fun. Mostly, it just feels gamey and silly; each faction has hundreds of thousands (if not millions. We're talking galactic scale, here) of ships... They really can't spare a couple more to support you? Sometimes you reach a point where something becomes less ****** and more stupid: "Captain Solo. We suspect that Vader's entire fleet may be hiding behind Endor's moon. Before we attack the Death Star, could you and Chewbacca take the Millennium Falcon and destroy the entire fleet single-handedly? That'd be great. Thanks." Obviously I'd rather space that's not on rails (I miss Tie Fighter soooo much....), but if I do have to be on rails, can you at least try to make the experience something that at least resembles something from the movies? In Episode III you see Jedi pilots in a big battle; their job is NOT to destroy the enemy fleet itself, they go in pairs, and even then they require Clone fighters to watch their back to stay alive. Luke blows up the first Death Star, but not because they sent him and his X-Wing in solo. The best thing about some of the space missions was that they had at least some nod towards you being part of a task force or fleet. Sure, the AI guys really don't kill anything, but it sure does add to the atmosphere to have allied fighters swarming around. I still haven't played all of the new missions, but so far I'd say that they're disappointing, and a missed opportunity. If their goal was to make space missions more popular, making them stupid-hard and designing them so that targets must be destroyed in a particular order or you will fail is not a great way to get more people enthused about space.... The early space missions were often designed around the concept of them being covert ops, as the galaxy wasn't yet at war. The new ones are lvl 50: The galaxy IS at war by that point. If anything, we should have less "one guy vs. a bunch of enemies" missions and more giant fleet battles where you're given a few specific objectives while swerving between giant capitol ships just kicking the crap out of each other.... *sigh*

Since when do you need to "fork over $100+" to do basic stuff? If you're not that into SWTOR (or, like some of my friends, your schedule is such that you never feel like you get your money's worth when you get an MMO subscription, as sometimes you barely get any playtime all month) then you're not likely to be the kind of person to spend a ton of cash on virtual clothing. Either way, why not have the option to only have the basics so that you can play through the class story? If you're really not into the MMO thing, will you really miss crafting, end-game, PvP, etc? Prolly not. I imagine most FtP players will end up spending at least one month's worth of subscription in the little add-ons (hiding head slot, action bars, etc.) If they find that they're spending a ton of time playing SWTOR, maybe they'll sub. If not, then they probably shouldn't. And remember, not everyone is so OCD that they're willing to spend $100 to make their companions outfit match better or whatever. I've got a friend who will be coming back now that the game is FtP (was in the "crazy schedule" category; he always liked the game). I doubt he'll spend more than $10 in cartel add-ons, but he'll get to finally enjoy the story for the game he bought back at launch.

*sigh* What percentage of people complaining that the space gear is P2W have actually beaten all the new space missions? 'Cause I know I can't. Some of those missions are HARD (though I'm handicapped by the fact that I run SWTOR windowed in a multi-monitor setup. That means it's not uncommon for me to accidentally click on another monitor, only for my ship to then fly into an asteroid... I really should start turning off windowed mode for space missions....). I think I tried 4 of 'em and beat maybe 1. One mission I was blown away so quick that I just stopped doing the space missions altogether for a while.... To reignite the semantic debate: Isn't it P2W only if they put out a tier of gear which is only available for $$$? If there was a new ultra-top-tier of PvP gear which was only available on the Cartel Market.... THAT would be P2W, because it puts non-paying players at a disadvantage that no amount of work grinding or luck with drops with ever compensate for. With the space missions, however, you can buy every one of the items on the GTN for amounts that a lot of the "grinding is part of the game, and I like it" people have sitting around in their accounts anyway. It's those of us who HATE grinding (and are therefore usually poor in game) who will buy it from the Cartel. I LOVE this, frankly. I'd love it if they let me buy campaign or dread guard gear for my newer 50's, cause otherwise I'm not gonna do very much with them until we have new story content (there's no way I'm gonna do the end-game gear grind with more than one toon. The very idea just bores me to tears. Those of you who space through the dialogue so you can get to the end-game gear grind faster, grind away. Just count me out.). Be nice, however, to pay a bit of money so that I can try out tanking in a new op (my best-geared toon is DPS). What I'd always reject, however, would be if they introduced a new tier that's slightly better than dread guard and made it Cartel-only. The kids who can barely afford their subscriptions but who do all their ops on multiple toons every week should always have the ability to have the top gear. I just never liked that this also means that old-fogeys like me with kids and work often end up not seeing the content that we payed for (heck, my guild in WoW sucked so bad that I never did a single Raid. Not one. I paid for all those big, plot-ending bosses in various expansions and I saw none of them. Scheduling was always too difficult, and our guild too small to compensate for this. So forgive me if I'm pretty skeptical when the guys who beat the raids/ops the week they came out and then complained about how there was "nothing to do" act like giving the rest of us a chance to see some content without an uber-grind is unfair. 'Cause for some of us, that's the only way we're gonna see it...) My preference would actually be for the game to always have slightly better gear available for the grinders than for the payers, as long as the gear that you can buy is good enough to make making it through content at least feasible (for ops, meaning that you can at least do story mode, but Hard or Nightmare might be impossible). Even more ideal might be to give the paid-for gear a different game or something, so hardcore ops folks know that you didn't "earn" it; that just 'cause you have campaign you're still a noob. *shrug* All I know for sure is that I REALLY like how the Cartel market has made it easier for me to focus on lowbie alts without having to switch to a 50 every few levels in order to grind Black Hole or whatever for cash to buy speeder training, etc. Having done planets like Alderaan so many times, the ability to just throw a bit of my free coins at the market in order to get lvl 3 speeder training for a lvl 32 toon is pretty great. And I know there's zero chance I would have saved up the money for the rocket boots without them being on the market.... Going through corridors you've done 7 times before a little bit faster for the win.

No, but I'll point out that there's another way to get a seat. A better metaphor is that you got to the theatre early and stood in line, and are angry that other people just went online, paid a few bucks extra, and got their tickets at home without having to stand in that long line. You're both seeing the same movie with seats of the exact same quality, they just paid more money for the convenience. If you think they're suckers for paying for for the same ticket, that's your right. That doesn't mean that you should boycott the theatre or try to ban online ticket sales. What makes this even more of a non-issue for me is that if you're one of the small minority who really, really likes the space missions, then you probably have a ton of comms sitting around anyway. I know i have guildies who did enough space missions to earn a Grade 8 box every few days or so, and that's well on the way to purchasing one of these new T7 items (this isn't to say that I don't agree that the price for the T7 space items is too high. I think they should be cut in half or so, but I think they should also be on the cartel and GTN as they are now). For those who stopped doing space missions after they finished the original missions, however, I think the ability to jump straight to the new missions without suddenly grinding a ton is great. After all, when a new Operation launches, they don't require a new tier of gear to run it; they have it DROP the new tier of gear. That wasn't the way the space missions were set up, however. Personally, I think making the Cartel an option was a pretty great solution.

Yup. As for people quitting: I don't want people in general to quit. But the people who have started their 8th "I'm quitting because of what was in the last patch" thread can leave. It's really tiresome. There are people on my server who seem to be in general fleet chat talking about how they're quitting the game nearly every time I'm on the fleet. They've been saying it for months, and they're still here. No wonder they don't like the game: They spend all their time on the forums or on the fleet talking about how they hate it, they hate EA/Bioware, and they're quitting. After a year, it's not surprising to see people saying: "Ok, then quit."

Well, feel free to play the space missions then. You can totally try them out without the gear. If you absolutely refuse to buy 'em (don't you have coins from subscribing?), grind away. Be my guest.

I've got a grad-school paper to procrastinate on. Liked what I saw of the game last night (had taken a break for a month or so due to real-world business), but I know that if I actually start the game up then I won't get my paper done in time. Thanks, whiners, for giving me some SWTOR-related thing to do, though.

In my experience, they usually just ignore your post or just say something about how you don't understand because you're not a hardcore player like they are. 'Cause we really should make it so the game is only fun for people who can spend 12+ hours a day grinding. Heck, maybe that's the root of the issue: The old "grind to get anything" method was great for the unemployed. Asking them to throw an extra $10 at a game that they've been playing for thousands of hours is distinctly unfair, I guess, since they DO have plenty of time, but they DON'T have $10. P2W whiners: Just think of the space missions as DLC that they asked you to pay a couple dollars for, but also gave you the option to grind to get it for free. You apparently like grinding, so get to it. Me, I hate grinding; I'm really not sure why wanting to have a good story in a multiplayer environment supposedly means that I also want to do the Black Hole missions or the late-game space missions 2000 times. I'd MUCH rather spend that time leveling alts, thanks.

As opposed to the rest of the year, when game designers work ridiculously long hours to make games for free. Can we just go ahead and change "General Discussion" to "Entitled Rantings"? I'm quickly remembering why I spend almost zero time in the SWTOR forums....

Run! The sky is falling! They gave the option to spend money so you can try the new missions for the minigame that most people don't even play! SWTOR is doooooooomed!

Nice post. Yhea, as someone who doesn't care that much about endgame (I had one toon I did Ops with, and I got tired of having to do groups every week. It started to feel like a chore. For some folks, that's the only thing they like about MMO's, but me, I can take it or leave it. Nice to see the content at least once, though. Should probably do a bit more soon to see the newer Ops....), but REALLY cares about story, I've been having a lot of fun with SWTOR. My main complaints early on were about how much grinding (or money, which requires grinding) it took to get you and your companions in matching armor sets. Now we can color match, so all is well with the world (hiding head slots for companions also made me very, very happy). I had taken a break, but I'm really liking what I've seen from the Cartel Market. If I don't want to do dailies for a few days to afford legacy unlocks or speeder training for my alts, I shouldn't have to. I'm not buying end-game gear, just stuff which allows me to skip quests I've already done on 3 other toons. Some people seem to never have had problems making the money to buy all those legacy unlocks a long time ago, but I guess I blew my money on matching armor or whatever , so I didn't. I did my BH grinding for money for a few toons, but it was burning me out (planning on completing all 8 stories eventually). The ability to just keep playing a leveling alt instead of having to switch to my 50 to grind for cash is a very, very appealing one to me. Huzzah.

It's the SWTOR forums. For some reason they're populated mainly by people who just hate everything about this game, yet spend all their time posting about it. I really can't understand how a handful of BH's PER WEEK (that lots of people, even with the upgrades, won't be able to earn. Some of these missions are HARD) = P2W. It's not like you can buy the BH comms directly. You've still gotta do the missions. The ability to buy the ship upgrades just means that those of us who haven't already spend a million years grinding space missions over and over (particularly on alts) can have a shot at trying the new missions. It doesn't make these missions easy, nor does it make them a faster way to get BH comms than doing daily FP's (cause they're not). The idea that the space missions will throw the system out of whack is ridiculous. But hey, that never stopped this forum....

How nice for you. Most of us find them really hard, and you can find several threads on the forum of people who think that they're so hard as to not be fun anymore. I'm kinda tempted to even call you a liar (doing them all in under an hour means that you pretty much did them all on the first try, which seems unlikely, as part of the trick to the hard missions is knowing when to use stuff like EMP. If you've never played through it, you'll probably let it off only to realize that you really need it later...), though it could be that you're just really young and therefore better at twitchy action stuff than us old fogies, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, I guess. Though why I'm engaging with anyone who used the phrase "biofail" is beyond me... I haven't played 'em all yet, but I do think they're kinda disappointing. I was really hoping for bigger scale, and only a few missions seem to provide it. Sure, they're bigger, but what I really mean is that I wanted (even on rails) to feel like I was part of a gigantic battle. Instead, lots seem to be: "Assault this fleet, on your own. Sure, we have a fleet with millions of ships (we're talking galactic scale, after all), but we're just sending one small freighter. You don't even get a wingman." My favorite space missions are the ones where, even if it's really just eye-candy, they give you a feeling of being part of a real task force (the "destroy the crippled ship" missions are the best example). Sure, your task force ends up not helping (or, if you want to play along, they help by drawing off other ships or whatever), but at least they try to pretend that this is a military operation. A lot of these missions don't. In a few cases, they've made the target MUCH bigger (such as the base assault mission), but you only see a few allied fighters supporting you (and that only in the first few seconds. Apparently they die almost immediately). Would it hurt to have a bunch of allied cruisers pop in, too? *sigh*

Got a green microphone headpiece today as a quest reward. It looks awesome. I'm kinda tempted to wear it even if my current headpiece is vastly better with regards to stats. I'd LOVE an orange version of this headset. It'd be my final headset for half my toons (particularly trooper and agent).

So as not to get everyone needing on every drop, why not just make the comms bind to legacy? Make it so you can mail your tionese (at the very least) comms to alts. Once you've spent that comm on equipment, it can stay BoP, but if you have a toon that's total Rakata/BH/Columi (and you've geared up a companion or two), then you can start mailing off tionese to an alt, making it so that when that alt hits 50 they'll be at least well geared enough to pull their own weight in the daily heroic quests, hard mode FPs, or story mode ops right off the bat (instead of having to grind dailies for weeks first or whatever). Heck, why not make this true for ALL commendations: just make comms into one big legacy-wide pool (Republic Taris comms show up as Imp Balmorra comms, etc). If you have 30 Hoth commendations from your Jedi Knight and 25 from your Sith Inquisitor, then your trooper would have a pool of 55 commendations to play with when they hit Hoth, etc, so that they can pick up a few equipment pieces right off the bat. You've done that content before on multiple toons, why not make it easier to blow through? It's not unbalanced, since it'd be stuff designed for that level anyway; you just get it faster for alts. Once that trooper hits 50, they'd have a bunch of tionese, columi, etc. comms waiting for them, and can get into an ops group right away. In this case you've already done the grind to SLOWLY earn columi and tionese pieces before TWICE. Why make the third time equally painful? This would solve a lot of problems, particularly the fact that the majority of comms in the game become totally worthless after a while. Once you've geared your toon and companions, anything remaining will just sit in your inventory forever.... Be really cool to know that those Nar Shaddaa comms you've piled up from doing heroics or flashpoints mean that a lowbie alt will have an orange headpiece as soon as they hit the right level to wear it, etc.... So yhea. Bind to Legacy comms.

Thanks for the needless spoiler.

Um... Can't speak for "faction imbalance" (not sure how EGA would have anything to do with that regardless), as I'm on PvE server and just don't care about it (to the point where I don't even know whether it exists or not... Nor will any of us know until after launch), but as for the other three: Yes. Yes. and Yes. I've had zero ques, have never felt an area was overcrowded (came closer in beta, actually), and think the sense of community has been fabulous; WAY better than I've ever seen in an MMO. Maybe my server's just awesome, but I doubt it. Edit: Just checked to see where these sever ques are... I see the problem. They're all in Europe. (that and Euros are all off work now) Perhaps there was a underestimation of how many European players there would be or something... My East Coast server population is listed as "Heavy", but I've never waited at all to get in, not once.

Totally agree. Can think of nothing to complain about the system. It's been perfectly smooth, starting areas aren't overloaded (they weren't on day one and they're not now), and I've had no crashes after playing for hours every day since day one. As for the QQers who think the game is now "pointless" since they can't be part of the "race to 50": Feel free to find a different game, then. We won't miss you. Anyone who thinks SWTOR is about the "race to 50" isn't doing it right. As far as I'm concerned, it's exactly what they promised: KOTOR 3 - 11 (with non-class quests duplicated, of course), but with the MMO, "I can play with my friends if I want to" stuff added as well. It allows me to play a great single player game AND get together with my guild to take down a World Boss all in the same game. It's everything I always wanted WoW to be, but which WoW never was. Didn't have to think twice before I got the 6-month (or whatever the longest one was) subscription after only a few days of play.... Great job, Bioware. If I still lived in that area of Texas, I'd order y'all some Taco Cabana on me. (you can share)

Find it odd to see so many folks assume that the "kiddies" are rolling Republic, when my server has two over-sized Republic guilds (i.e. they had to split into 4 guilds (no alts allowed), each of which is also full) designed around older folks with kids and jobs. ("Old Republic Dads", "ORD2: Outer Rim Division", "Old Timers Guild", and "OldTimersGuild") Then again, I saw in WoW an assumption that Horde was more professional because Alliance was all "kiddies". Since when is being able to play an MMO 18 hours a day every day a sign of being older? Sounds to me a sign of being a teenager during summer break or a college student who's skipping classes a lot. In gaming, the older gamers are often the noobs, 'cause we don't have as much time to get good at the game as you younger gamers.

I think this method of launch is brilliant. I alleviates the worst thing about a launch: Everyone being in the starting zones at the same time, competing over mobs and quest items. Now we're gonna be spread over the first few worlds, making the actual questing much more enjoyable for everyone. Since most of us have real lives, the losers who will do nothing for the next month or so but play this game will soon level past the early access people. But at least everyone's starting planet experience will be much more enjoyable this way. And, as has been stated before: Everyone who's whining about this is more than welcome to go play another game. Please. It's really ok with the rest of us if you just go. We won't take it too hard, I promise.... Note to self: Get all alts off the starting planets before the 20th.... Edit: Again, the staggered access thing seems to be more a "make the zones spread out more" thing than a "the servers will crash" thing. That's what the stress test was for: it put way more on the server than will eventually ever be allowed and still they got the servers to not crash. So stop assuming it's about "crashing the servers", 'cause it's not.

Quoted for truth. Never understood the point of racing for the end-game anyway. You're paying money to play a game that they took years designing, writing, recording dialogue for, etc. What's the point of skipping 99% of the game just so you can play the last 1% over and over and over? And can someone design an MMO that skips the game and goes straight to raiding so that the people who care about nothing else can go there and leave me to quest in peace? We can have the game start you out at level 1,230, just so you feel like you accomplished something. You didn't, and it doesn't mean anything, as you'll never level; you'll just grind for gear all day, every day. But at least you'll do it far away from me.